Judge Takes Away Mom’s Baby-Naming Rights After She Tried to Name Her Daughter After Poison

There are a lot of words that sound beautiful to the ear, if you don’t know what they mean. “Diarrhea” comes up as one of the most beautiful words in the English language, in polls of people who do not actually speak English. By that logic “Cyanide” would actually be quite a pretty word, if you didn’t know what it meant, but that did not do one Welsh mother much good when she intentionally tried to name her baby girl after the deadly poison, and a judge said no freaking way.

According to Good Housekeeping, the mother from Powys, Wales, gave birth to boy and girl twins and declared that she would name them “Preacher” and “Cyanide.” Social workers were involved in the mother’s case, because the mother had a history of drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness, and the two babies and their three half-siblings had been placed in foster care. When the social workers heard what the mother intended to name the twins, they intervened and tried to stop her, on the grounds that naming a little girl “Cyanide” would cause her emotional harm.

The social workers managed to get an injunction to stop the mother from registering her baby names, and finally they went before the court, where Justice Eleanor King ruled that the mother should not be allowed to name the little girl Cyanide.

The girl’s mother had stuck to her guns, even in court. She argued that she had the right to name her children whatever she wanted, and she insisted that Cyanide was a pretty name for a little girl, and also that it had “positive implications” because it was the poison that had killed Hitler and Goebbels.

The judge did not agree, and said the little girl would suffer emotionally after being named after a deadly poison, especially since she would likely see it as a rejection by her birth mother and an attempt to punish her.

“It is hard to see how … the twin girl could regard being named after this deadly poison as other than a complete rejection of her by her birth mother,” Justice King said.

The judge agreed that taking away a mother’s naming rights was an extreme move, and she said a court should only intervene in the “most extreme cases,” and she said this counted.

Little not-Cyanide’s brother was meant to be named Preacher, and the judge and social workers all said that was unconventional but not nearly as bad as Cyanide. But the judge ruled that the babies’ three half-siblings would be allowed to choose names for the babies. The names they chose have not been revealed, but they basically have to be better than Cyanide.

(Image: iStockPhoto / kirza)

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